Hand held communication devices, such as mobile telephones and PDAs, currently are adapted to incorporate a variety of functions and to support multiple mechanisms of communication. For example, a mobile phone can provide traditional wireless telephone functions, while also providing the ability for a user to capture digital images and the ability to transmit or receive captured images for display on the phone's LCD. Indeed, the modern mobile phone allows the user to send and receive text messages, audio and video clips, graphics and images via electronic mail, Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Message Service (MMS), in addition to simply talking to another caller. It is foreseeable that advances in technology will produce personal communication devices that support even more mechanisms of information exchange, such as ftp and other types of direct connections.
Each communication mechanism is associated with a particular addressing scheme, such as a phone number for phone calls, an email address for electronic messages, or an http URL for posting images. The personal communication devices that support a wide range of communication mechanisms, generally treat each mechanism separately. This can present challenges for the user who wishes to exchange information that cannot be sent, or is inconvenient to send, over a single mechanism.
For example, the user may be speaking to a customer by phone and may want the customer to view a document. With the current communication device, the user would be required to implement two separate data exchange mechanisms, e.g. phone communication and electronic mail, and also would be required to know the caller's address scheme, e.g., phone number and email address, associated with each mechanism. In operation, the caller would use the communication device, e.g., mobile phone, to call the customer using the customer's phone number, terminate the call, setup the mobile phone to send an email message with the attached document, provide or select from the device's address book the customer's email address, transmit the email message, and reestablish the telephone call with the customer. Accordingly, while current communication devices support multiple communication mechanisms, utilizing such mechanisms is cumbersome and inefficient.
Accordingly, a need exists for a communication device that supports a plurality of communication mechanisms in an integrated manner such that the user can easily implement more than one mechanism simultaneously. The present invention addresses such a need.